After a 10-year run, the pioneer in New Economy magazines – Red Herring – is dead.

Magazine staffers received the grim news at about 2 p.m. yesterday. The magazine is said to have lost $5 million in the past year.

Despite a downsizing in August that effectively sliced the employee roster in half, the operation continued to lose money.

In October, a restructuring left its liabilities with the former company while a new holding company, RHC Media, was formed with venture capitalist Broadview Capital as the new majority owner.

“It’s sad,” said founder Tony Perkins, who said the magazine made money for its first seven years of existence.

Last year, its ad-page tally was 404.7, down 66 percent from a year earlier. In 2000, at the height of the dot-com madness, the company had racked up 3,357 ad pages.

But in the current battered market, the new company did not meet its goals and the venture-capitalist owner decided to bail out rather than pump in more money.

“The ad market in the first quarter was not what we expected it to be and when you’re hitting only 75 percent it can spook your investors,” said RHC Media CEO Chris Dobbrow.

“I’m saddened by the news,” said Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0. “It was a once-great magazine.” Now all Red Herring can do is try to find a buyer for its list of paid subscribers.

“I think their subscriber file is going to have some value,” said Scott Stawski, an industry consultant at Imforte.

But how much is open to conjecture. The circulation dropped from 325,000 to 275,000 in the past year.

The company that once employed more than 200 people at the height of the Internet boom in 2000 was down to only 31 full-time employees – including only 11 editorial staffers – at the time of its demise.

Survivors in the niche include Wired, owned by Conde Nast, Business 2.0, and Fast Company, owned by Gruner + Jahr.

The later is searching for a new editor-in-chief to take over from Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, who will stay involved with the magazine they founded, but who won’t stay in the top slots.